My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing - White Like Her

This was a good rendering of you moms secret. Unfortunately whites have deemed that white is best. Black people cannotl afford even today the best of everything. We are oppressed, we have no culture or history. I don blame your mother for passing. She was ensuring a better life for herself and her children. We can't know tribe we come from or experience the life, customs and languages . Unfortunately if you are not pure African they view us differently. I am Kenyon, Nigerian, south Asian, Welsh, Finnish, and Irish. I look like a person of color. I'm yellow w golden undertones. It hurts my heart because I want to be full African. I hope your family and friends understand that you my sister are white despite you African DNA.

The author actually knew very little about her mother’s early life...and mom refused to talk about it. Consequently the author chose to fill in all those blank pages with Civil War facts, lessons about slavery as well as the minutiae of her genealogy research, etc.. The latter was tedious and confusing and frankly I skipped much of it — it’s really not that fascinating unless they are *your* ancestors.

At the very end she reveals that through her research and the TV show she has discovered and made contact with many members of her mother’s extended family. They include all colors and shades, some who identified with being white and some who chose not to. I think this was where the author’s real story should have been, multiple stories actually, just waiting to be told. It was a missed opportunity but perhaps the author can try again to tell her family’s story, this time focusing on the human experience and not the dry facts.

i remember seeing the author on Genealogy Roadshow, so I wanted to know the rest of her mother's family history. It was fascinating and the author showed her persistence at digging up the truth. She also showed herself to be a vulnerable human being by describing her raw emotions, not only dealing with her mother's passing as white, but her alcoholic father's abusive personality. The only thing lacking, for me at least, was more photos of many of the people she described, particularly her new-found family in New Orleans and her son, who she said resembled her mother with his darker skin and curly hair. Now I am curious to read Ms. Lukasik's mystery novels.

I thought that the topic of this book was fascinating and that it would help me to learn more about our country's history from another racial perspective. I learned a lot and then some! History came alive and societal categorization of humans based on skin color and blood lines in Louisiana was truly fascinating, as was the genealogical journey with the author! I'm forever grateful for her courage to tell her story. It's important for us to know the history of our country that isn't "politically correct", that people don't talk about, and which is omitted from our school's history books. Only if we understand another's family background and experience and truly honor everyone's humanity can we come together as a diverse country of very rich cultural and racial heritage, as well as unspoken history.

The author has done a great disservice when she might otherwise have made a positive contribution. Instead of using her mixed-white Creole mother's story to point out that whiteness in America is also multiracial, she instead accepts a myth of white racial purity. There has never been absolute agreement about who is "white" in this country and even many Southern towns had white families who were known to have some small amount of African ancestry." The author's mom was a mixed-white Creole and NOT a black. It's ironic that Louisiana's racist suppression of Creole ethnic identity is presented as something good instead of condemned as evil. The author's "research" (or what "passes" for it) is also very poor. The only real scholarship on actual people (as opposed to cheap novels, movies, etc.) who dealt with challenges to their whiteness om courts of law has been done by Frank W. Sweet Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule and Daniel Sharfstein The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. Other excellent work has been done by Virginia Dominguez White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. There's more, but these are the BASICS and they are not in the bibliography.

A.D. Powell
Author, "Passing" for Who You Really Are
Passing For Who You Really Are: Essays in Support of Multiracial Whiteness

Very well written book about a woman’s journey to uncover her mother’s secret that she was mixed race. I loved how her research showed the changing definitions of race. In one decade a relative was considered colored and in another white. I had no idea that the laws defining race changed over the decades. I also didn’t know that colored was a different classification than black. I am a half percent Native American, one percent African and over 98 percent European (white). Depending on the decade, I would be considered colored and be required to sit in the back of the bus.

It's a story worthy of telling. But sometimes the author's whiteness in lacking in understanding race was distracting. I guess that I thought she would understand race better, having learned about her family history. But she still has gaping blinddpots.

This is an interesting and intriguing read. Discovering her racial heritage and having writing skills, the author leads us through her own exploration to understand why her mother made such a radical decision to hide her own racial history. As more Americans discover their mixed racial heritage from DNA testing, this is an excellent book for understanding the "passing" that was so common.

The author sheds remarkable light on the complexities of race, gender, and culture through the lens of her mother, who ultimately made a decision that would follow her the rest of her life. Fortunately, in discovering her mother's secret, the author also unravels an important piece of family history that connects the past to the present.

First, let me say the book is fascinating. I recommend it for sure. My one and only issue is the concept of "passing as white". Her family was not "passing". They are white. They are black. It astonishes me how mixed race (and truthfully, we are ALL mixed race) usually suppress or almost deny white heritage. Colin Kaepernick seems to forget his mother is white. Barack Obama does not identify with his white family. What if we all acknowledge we came from many "ingredients" and our goal will be to be the best human beings we can.